Going from Geforce to new Radeon 9800np, anything I should know?

[Caanon]

I ordered an oem Sapphire Radeon 9800 (non pro) from new egg...supposedly these should have good ram chips to overclock well(is this based on luck, or all the current sapphires have??)...but even if it doesn't I should be pretty happy with it, I mostly wanted to be able to run at high graphics settings (aa+af) without worry about framerates.

I know ati has had driver issues in the past...I assume those are for the most part resolved? Have many problems with specific games? Play Bf1942 quite a bit now...(does AA work any better in BF with radeon compared to the messed up text with Nvidia), also play America's army(unreal engine) and play other games as well.

current system is P4@2.66 summer/2.85 winter 512mb DDR400(bit less summer), winXP pro etc.
This should be pretty decent for HL2 right?

crap 2d>>Voodoo2>>Voodoo3 3000>>GF2MX 64Mb(opps...research good, whims bad)>>GF4 4200>>Radeon 9800

edit: also...there is no problem just running ATI reference drivers right? like with GFs.

Thanks for any help/tips.

 

[nick1985]

dl driver cleaner

 

[Intelman07]

Sounds like the future me. hehe....reformat or download driver cleaner like someone else said.

 

[gramboh]

Gabe Newell in one of the many HL2 interviews (I think this one is from city-17.net) said that HL2 will get about 40fps in a P4 ~2.0GHz, 512meg ram, Radeon 9700 pro at 1280x1024 with "everything turned on" (pretty sure no AA/Ansio). Should get ~60 on your rig at that resolution then I'd guess (if you OC to 9800P)

 

[JulesMaximus]

I just did an upgrade from nVidia (GeForce3 TI500) to an ATI 9800NP from newegg.com (same card you are getting) about a week ago. I had no problems by simply uninstalling the nVidia drivers, reboot install the new card and install the ATI drivers. YMMV.

I noticed a huge increase in performance though and this card is very stable in my system.